The travellers are not happy. The taxpayers are not happy. Ministers are not happy. Six years into a Labour government, the railway is running less successfully than it was in 1997 when they took over. What has gone wrong? Why does the ruling party of the railwayman find it so difficult to get the trains to run on time?
It all looked so different six years ago. John Prescott seemed proud of his privatised railway, boasting that in its early years passenger numbers rose by more than a quarter, and rail freight surged by around a third. Then came the crashes. Labour decided to blame privatisation. They seized the opportunity to regulate toughly.
The new climate made it difficult for Railtrack to survive financially without more government support for their expensive track renewal programmes forced on them by circumstance and the safety inspectorates. Stephen Byers decided to bankrupt the company rather than give it a helping hand. That was a monumentally expensive decision. Most of the £29 billion of public money earmarked for railway expansion and management under the 10 Year Plan has been swallowed up in patch and repair in the opening years of the period.
Today a more sensible and sober Secretary of State, less inclined to socialist ideology and to playing with the political train set, ponders how he can square the circle. He wants to meet the demands of his backbenchers to modernise the West Coast mainline to Scotland. Advisers tell him the money is going to run out, perhaps around Preston. He would like to start Crossrail in London, where there are so many marginal seats, but the project is synonymous with delay and is very dear. He would like to help the long suffering passengers, especially the commuters who have been promised more and better services. Despite a massive investment in new trains, the railway is still dogged with delays, speed restrictions, train breakdowns. He would like to get through to the reshuffle or the election with transport well off the front pages. No news is better than bad news.
If he wishes to pull off any of these aims, he is going to have to be more radical. There will not be enough money from public budgets to keep the existing railway going, let alone to put in the glamour projects. His Conservative Shadow is no financial threat to him, for he will be operating under budgetary controls even fiercer than Gordon Brown applies to Alistair Darling. There is no danger of a subsidy war, or a runaway away auction for more public investment.
In today’s railway there is a lethal tension between some of the players. The government chose to create a buffer between itself and the industry by inventing the Strategic Rail Authority. It hasn’t worked out as they hoped. The natural role of the SRA is to become the megaphone of the industry for more public money. That makes them unpopular with ministers. If they try to become the railway’s mentor and critic, that exposes them to the anger of the whole industry. It is an uncomfortable position, however they play it. The Secretary of State is intimating that he wants them to play a smaller role. Why not simply abolish them,? The money saved could be spent more wisely. The Department of Transport could go back to making its own decisions about the political priorities, about the larger glamour projects, and the direction of government investment and subsidy.
The train operating companies and Network Rail, the provider of track and signals, also have their ups and downs. Every time a train is late they may clash over whether the delay resulted from track and signal failure, or from train operating company mistakes. Some train operating companies would like to respond to potential demand by offering more services. Network Rail may say this is impossible, as it is so busy trying to keep what it has in use that it cannot provide for expansion.
Alastair Darling is tiptoeing towards the train company solution – reunite trains and track. He is trying out joint offices, where problems can be resolved more quickly, blame apportioned and remedies applied all in one go through joint working. This is a sensible measure. He is looking at whether new ways of collaborative working can be tried on the least used track. Why not take it to its logical conclusion, and offer parts of Network Rail’s assets to the appropriate train company?
This would have three benefits. It would remove so much complication and argument between the different sections of the business, making daily management better. It would free the train companies to make the extra investment in track or signal where they thought market demand warranted and they saw an opportunity to provide more service. It would solve some of the capital shortage, as the private sector would have the money to run more trains on more track.
Gordon Brown’s very temporary solution is to allow Network Rail to borrow more and more, with an implicit or explicit Treasury guarantee, whilst claiming this is private finance. It is difficult to believe this money could be raised without government backing, and unlikely there will ever be a profit on the money spent. The railway is very old technology, struggling to adapt to the weight speed and volume demands of the modern world. Whilst China puts in a Maglev system capable of running at more than twice the speed of anything we have, and as Japan’s privatised railway shows what can be achieved with more modern dedicated track for true express trains, the UK patches and muddles on a Victorian railway, improving the way they tip sand on the track in their desperate search for grip when braking.
The best hope for the railways would be to give or sell control of the track to private companies running the trains, to limit the amount of subsidy they will be granted, and to encourage new technology developments for the new routes public transport ought to serve. Investment has to be made in the private sector – neither main party will be able to spend enough to solve the problem on the public account. Pretending that Network Rail, a state pensioner, is a private sector risk bearing company is not the answer.
